After a day of meeting and talking to people that only do the stuff they really love doing (Blue Bottle, Pixar, as well as Brad and Michael the day before) there we were, right in the middle of the old Naval Air Base of Almeda facing the skyline of San Francisco to finish of our second day of inspirational insights.
And the first thing we hear from our wonderful host Lance Winters, even before welcoming us to St. Georg Spirits was “Please grab a drink over there can’t stand people visiting a distillery and being sober”. Great start for an afternoon of ‘spiritual insights’ into making a product with the perfect taste and a ‘little bit of alcohol’. Of course, we were not offered just ‘anything’ but rather St. George Spirits Absinthe Verte the perfect drug for our brains and the perfect basis for Lances further talk. He loves his job as this is the “only job in the world where you are legally permitted to poison people” Lance is St. Georges Master Distiller and originally trained nuclear engineer. He came to St. George Spirits after having slid into beer-making and applied for the ‘job’ with a bottle of homemade whiskey. This experiment convinced the founder of St. Goerge Spirits, the German-born Joerg Rupf, and since then, Lance is continuing to ‘screw around’ with new flavors and building great spirit from them.
And he does take this ‘screwing around’ seriously. Lance has pretty much tried to distill everything that crossed his eyes and promised a good taste. He has not tried the Grenouille-approach yet, but tried a lot of different other things, from mushrooms, all kinds of local and unknown fruits, chipotle, foi gras, wasabi and even his old Christmas tree. Unfortunately we could not try that one but we did get a chance of tasting his ‘carrot’ experiment, which he produced for a special dinner reception. First time a spirit truly felt ‘healthy’.
St. George Spirits bread-and-butter product is the Hanger One vodka. It runs so well it lets Lance the freedom to do other stuff (he said something else here but that was not suited for print). As a result, when the ‘Absinthe Prohibition’ ended in the States (as it did all over the world) he changed his mind from never wanting to make an absinthe to trying, tasting, changing and trying again and in the end, building a truly fascinating absinthe. It took him ten and a half tries (the half one was just adding an additional note, so it did not really count) and eleven years . (Watch more of it on YouTube). The hard part was getting approval for the design of the label. There are laws in the USA how to design a label at the time St. George Spirits started they were not written down yet so it took some tries as well to get things approved. For example: Originally he wanted to have a monkey banging on a skull with two bones framed in a ‘stock-certificate design’. But the authorities did not like the ‘monkey banging on the skull’ (they were afraid people might think the drink could drive them crazy). So it had to be changed.
Making the perfect spirit is not about asking a focus group. It’s about having the right passion for building a perfect product. If it fails, it’s Lances fault he knows that. But it’s HIS product that failed and not a focus-group-compromise. So he knows what to change. Some of his experiments never seen public daylight but those that did always excelled.
Currently he’s looking forward to the coming sugarcane harvest. He already ordered a large batch and is eager to stick them into his pot stills. I’m sure we’ll hear about further amazing stuff the passionate perfectionists at St. George Spirits will come up with in the near future. Get ready to get drunk!
(I know, I’m late writing this post – and it was written while sipping the last bits of our Hanger One Mandarine Blossom sampling we received – see how this is made on YouTube as well. So if you don’t like what I wrote, I can blame it on having been drunk. If you like it, then I should think about a therapy).
And if you want to read more, have a look at:
Or St. George Spirits Homepage.
Or this nice film about the “mean people” at St. George Spirits.
Or a second article about our visit as part of a bigger recap of CSSF.
